Before transmitting data in a communication system, the system may determine what the configuration of the transmitter should be to provide sufficient link performance as measured by a performance metric, such as a signal-to-noise ratio, a signal-to-interference-plus-noise ratio, an average bit error rate (BER), a packet error rate after decoding error correction decoding, and any other indication of the performance of a channel. For example, the configuration of the transmitter may be specified by one or more of the following: a modulation type, such as quadrature amplitude modulation and the like; a level of modulation, such as 4-level quadrature amplitude modulation (QAM), 8-level QAM, and the like; a code rate; a transmit power; and a number of streams to be used for multiple input, multiple output (MIMO), such as 2 transmit and receive streams, 4 streams, and the like. If the transmitter configuration is not selected properly, the transmission link may be underutilized or the link may be unusable due to excess errors.